The Hurt Locker - A Kathryn Bigelow Film

Iraq War Movie with a Great Lead Performance by Jeremy Renner

Jun 30, 2009

Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq War drama is a nerve-shredding drama about a team of bomb disposal experts featuring cameos from Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce and Evangeline Lilley.

After losing their leader, an elite US army bomb disposal unit gets a temporary replacement for the remaining 39 days of their tour. New boy Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) immediately antagonises his new colleagues with his unusual, but inventive techniques. Sergeant Sandborn (Anthony Mackie) and the nervous Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) are used to the safety first methods of their old boss. James is a wild man, happy to take off his safety suit when inspecting a car bomb or to ignore advice from his colleagues.

The Hurt Locker was amongst the films chosen to play in the Best of the Fest selection on the last day of the Edinburgh Film Festival. Although most films about the Iraq War have failed to find an audience The Hurt Locker deserves better. Bigelow is not the type to lecture an audience about politics and here focuses on how the unit operates under extreme stress knowing one wrong movement could end their lives at any moment. Written by journalist Mark Boal who spent time with bomb disposal experts in Iraq, The Hurt Locker is an intense look at combat from the point of view of those in the firing line.

If there is any justice Jeremy Renner should be a star very soon. An actor to watch ever since he starred in Dahmer (David Jacobson 2002), a haunting little film about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, Renner has shone in 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo 2007) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik 2007). Renner is just as charismatic in The Hurt Locker making James likeable despite his wild man machismo.

Kathryn Bigelow’s best films tend to be about an individual who is drawn into, or belongs to a group of people involved in high-risk situations. In The Loveless (co-director Monty Montgomery 1982) Willem Dafoe and his 50’s biker gang find trouble in a small town. In Near Dark (1987) farm worker Adrian Pasdar (Heroes) becomes the newest member of a hillbilly tribe of vampires. Blue Steel (1990) has a newly promoted female cop (Jamie Lee Curtis) battling a psychopathic killer. Point Break (1991) sees undercover FBI agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) infiltrating a bunch of bank-robber surf dudes.

Strange Days (1995) however was something of a departure for Bigelow. It imagined Los Angeles on the eve of the Millennium as an apocalyptic urban hell, but the film felt derivative with its dystopian imagery borrowed from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982) and died at the box office. The Weight of Water (2002) with its flashbacks felt like watching somebody trying to make an Atom Egoyan film, never advisable unless you actually are Egoyan. K-19 The Widowmaker (2002) is a big, dull and lifeless studio production.

However The Hurt Locker is a return to form, with Bigelow’s taut direction bringing the audience right into the middle of tense sequences involving James and his colleagues having to disable a variety of explosive devices, some of which are fiendishly designed. There is a particularly tense standoff with a taxi driver, who seems to have driven into the wrong place at the wrong time, but refuses to reverse his car. The Hurt Locker will receive a limited release on the 26th July in the United States before making its way slowly around the rest of the world. Please see it.

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